A side project sent Russ d'Sa looking for better audio infrastructure. After years of building consumer products, the LiveKit co-founder found a business in the machinery that lets people - and now AI - talk to each other.

Russ d'Sa is the co-founder and CEO of LiveKit, the open source real-time communication platform that became the connective tissue of voice AI. When you tap the voice button in ChatGPT, your phone is talking to a LiveKit server. He has built five companies, shipped Twitter Cards, sold a launcher app (Evie) to Medium, and now runs the nervous system for OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce Agentforce, Tesla, Spotify and thousands of other voice agents.